The Marble Faun, by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Chapter 46

A Walk on the Campagna

It was a bright forenoon of February; a month in which the brief severity of a Roman winter is already past, and
when violets and daisies begin to show themselves in spots favored by the sun. The sculptor came out of the city by the
gate of San Sebastiano, and walked briskly along the Appian Way.

For the space of a mile or two beyond the gate, this ancient and famous road is as desolate and disagreeable as most
of the other Roman avenues. It extends over small, uncomfortable paving-stones, between brick and plastered walls,
which are very solidly constructed, and so high as almost to exclude a view of the surrounding country. The houses are
of most uninviting aspect, neither picturesque, nor homelike and social; they have seldom or never a door opening on
the wayside, but are accessible only from the rear, and frown inhospitably upon the traveller through iron-grated
windows. Here and there appears a dreary inn or a wine-shop, designated by the withered bush beside the entrance,
within which you discern a stone-built and sepulchral interior, where guests refresh themselves with sour bread and
goats’-milk cheese, washed down with wine of dolorous acerbity.

At frequent intervals along the roadside up-rises the ruin of an ancient tomb. As they stand now, these structures
are immensely high and broken mounds of conglomerated brick, stone, pebbles, and earth, all molten by time into a mass
as solid and indestructible as if each tomb were composed of a single boulder of granite. When first erected, they were
cased externally, no doubt, with slabs of polished marble, artfully wrought bas-reliefs, and all such suitable
adornments, and were rendered majestically beautiful by grand architectural designs. This antique splendor has long
since been stolen from the dead, to decorate the palaces and churches of the living. Nothing remains to the dishonored
sepulchres, except their massiveness.

Even the pyramids form hardly a stranger spectacle, or are more alien from human sympathies, than the tombs of the
Appian Way, with their gigantic height, breadth, and solidity, defying time and the elements, and far too mighty to be
demolished by an ordinary earthquake. Here you may see a modern dwelling, and a garden with its vines and olive-trees,
perched on the lofty dilapidation of a tomb, which forms a precipice of fifty feet in depth on each of the four sides.
There is a home on that funereal mound, where generations of children have been born, and successive lives been spent,
undisturbed by the ghost of the stern Roman whose ashes were so preposterously burdened. Other sepulchres wear a crown
of grass, shrubbery, and forest-trees, which throw out a broad sweep of branches, having had time, twice over, to be a
thousand years of age. On one of them stands a tower, which, though immemorially more modern than the tomb, was itself
built by immemorial hands, and is now rifted quite from top to bottom by a vast fissure of decay; the tomb-hillock, its
foundation, being still as firm as ever, and likely to endure until the last trump shall rend it wide asunder, and
summon forth its unknown dead.

Yes; its unknown dead! For, except in one or two doubtful instances, these mountainous sepulchral edifices have not
availed to keep so much as the bare name of an individual or a family from oblivion. Ambitious of everlasting
remembrance, as they were, the slumberers might just as well have gone quietly to rest, each in his pigeon-hole of a
columbarium, or under his little green hillock in a graveyard, without a headstone to mark the spot. It is rather
satisfactory than otherwise, to think that all these idle pains have turned out so utterly abortive.

About two miles, or more, from the city gate, and right upon the roadside, Kenyon passed an immense round pile,
sepulchral in its original purposes, like those already mentioned. It was built of great blocks of hewn stone, on a
vast, square foundation of rough, agglomerated material, such as composes the mass of all the other ruinous tombs. But
whatever might be the cause, it was in a far better state of preservation than they. On its broad summit rose the
battlements of a mediaeval fortress, out of the midst of which (so long since had time begun to crumble the
supplemental structure, and cover it with soil, by means of wayside dust) grew trees, bushes, and thick festoons of
ivy. This tomb of a woman had become the citadel and donjon-keep of a castle; and all the care that Cecilia Metella’s
husband could bestow, to secure endless peace for her beloved relics, had only sufficed to make that handful of
precious ashes the nucleus of battles, long ages after her death.

A little beyond this point, the sculptor turned aside from the Appian Way, and directed his course across the
Campagna, guided by tokens that were obvious only to himself. On one side of him, but at a distance, the Claudian
aqueduct was striding over fields and watercourses. Before him, many miles away, with a blue atmosphere between, rose
the Alban hills, brilliantly silvered with snow and sunshine.

He was not without a companion. A buffalo-calf, that seemed shy and sociable by the selfsame impulse, had begun to
make acquaintance with him, from the moment when he left the road. This frolicsome creature gambolled along, now
before, now behind; standing a moment to gaze at him, with wild, curious eyes, he leaped aside and shook his shaggy
head, as Kenyon advanced too nigh; then, after loitering in the rear, he came galloping up, like a charge of cavalry,
but halted, all of a sudden, when the sculptor turned to look, and bolted across the Campagna at the slightest signal
of nearer approach. The young, sportive thing, Kenyon half fancied, was serving him as a guide, like the heifer that
led Cadmus to the site of his destined city; for, in spite of a hundred vagaries, his general course was in the right
direction, and along by several objects which the sculptor had noted as landmarks of his way.

In this natural intercourse with a rude and healthy form of animal life, there was something that wonderfully
revived Kenyon’s spirits. The warm rays of the sun, too, were wholesome for him in body and soul; and so was a breeze
that bestirred itself occasionally, as if for the sole purpose of breathing upon his cheek and dying softly away, when
he would fain have felt a little more decided kiss. This shy but loving breeze reminded him strangely of what Hilda’s
deportment had sometimes been towards himself.

The weather had very much to do, no doubt, with these genial and delightful sensations, that made the sculptor so
happy with mere life, in spite of a head and heart full of doleful thoughts, anxieties, and fears, which ought in all
reason to have depressed him. It was like no weather that exists anywhere, save in Paradise and in Italy; certainly not
in America, where it is always too strenuous on the side either of heat or cold. Young as the season was, and wintry,
as it would have been under a more rigid sky, it resembled summer rather than what we New Englanders recognize in our
idea of spring. But there was an indescribable something, sweet, fresh, and remotely affectionate, which the matronly
summer loses, and which thrilled, and, as it were, tickled Kenyon’s heart with a feeling partly of the senses, yet far
more a spiritual delight. In a word, it was as if Hilda’s delicate breath were on his cheek.

After walking at a brisk pace for about half an hour, he reached a spot where an excavation appeared to have been
begun, at some not very distant period. There was a hollow space in the earth, looking exceedingly like a deserted
cellar, being enclosed within old subterranean walls, constructed of thin Roman bricks, and made accessible by a narrow
flight of stone steps. A suburban villa had probably stood over this site, in the imperial days of Rome, and these
might have been the ruins of a bathroom, or some other apartment that was required to be wholly or partly under ground.
A spade can scarcely be put into that soil, so rich in lost and forgotten things, without hitting upon some discovery
which would attract all eyes, in any other land. If you dig but a little way, you gather bits of precious marble,
coins, rings, and engraved gems; if you go deeper, you break into columbaria, or into sculptured and richly frescoed
apartments that look like festive halls, but were only sepulchres.

The sculptor descended into the cellar-like cavity, and sat down on a block of stone. His eagerness had brought him
thither sooner than the appointed hour. The sunshine fell slantwise into the hollow, and happened to be resting on what
Kenyon at first took to be a shapeless fragment of stone, possibly marble, which was partly concealed by the crumbling
down of earth.

But his practised eye was soon aware of something artistic in this rude object. To relieve the anxious tedium of his
situation, he cleared away some of the soil, which seemed to have fallen very recently, and discovered a headless
figure of marble. It was earth stained, as well it might be, and had a slightly corroded surface, but at once impressed
the sculptor as a Greek production, and wonderfully delicate and beautiful. The head was gone; both arms were broken
off at the elbow. Protruding from the loose earth, however, Kenyon beheld the fingers of a marble hand; it was still
appended to its arm, and a little further search enabled him to find the other. Placing these limbs in what the nice
adjustment of the fractures proved to be their true position, the poor, fragmentary woman forthwith showed that she
retained her modest instincts to the last. She had perished with them, and snatched them back at the moment of revival.
For these long-buried hands immediately disposed themselves in the manner that nature prompts, as the antique artist
knew, and as all the world has seen, in the Venus de’ Medici.

“What a discovery is here!” thought Kenyon to himself. “I seek for Hilda, and find a marble woman! Is the omen good
or ill?”

In a corner of the excavation lay a small round block of stone, much incrusted with earth that had dried and
hardened upon it. So, at least, you would have described this object, until the sculptor lifted it, turned it hither
and thither in his hands, brushed off the clinging soil, and finally placed it on the slender neck of the newly
discovered statue. The effect was magical. It immediately lighted up and vivified the whole figure, endowing it with
personality, soul, and intelligence. The beautiful Idea at once asserted its immortality, and converted that heap of
forlorn fragments into a whole, as perfect to the mind, if not to the eye, as when the new marble gleamed with snowy
lustre; nor was the impression marred by the earth that still hung upon the exquisitely graceful limbs, and even filled
the lovely crevice of the lips. Kenyon cleared it away from between them, and almost deemed himself rewarded with a
living smile.

It was either the prototype or a better repetition of the Venus of the Tribune. But those who have been dissatisfied
with the small head, the narrow, soulless face, the button-hole eyelids, of that famous statue, and its mouth such as
nature never moulded, should see the genial breadth of this far nobler and sweeter countenance. It is one of the few
works of antique sculpture in which we recognize womanhood, and that, moreover, without prejudice to its divinity.

Here, then, was a treasure for the sculptor to have found! How happened it to be lying there, beside its grave of
twenty centuries? Why were not the tidings of its discovery already noised abroad? The world was richer than yesterday,
by something far more precious than gold. Forgotten beauty had come back, as beautiful as ever; a goddess had risen
from her long slumber, and was a goddess still. Another cabinet in the Vatican was destined to shine as lustrously as
that of the Apollo Belvedere; or, if the aged pope should resign his claim, an emperor would woo this tender marble,
and win her as proudly as an imperial bride!

Such were the thoughts with which Kenyon exaggerated to himself the importance of the newly discovered statue, and
strove to feel at least a portion of the interest which this event would have inspired in him a little while before.
But, in reality, he found it difficult to fix his mind upon the subject. He could hardly, we fear, be reckoned a
consummate artist, because there was something dearer to him than his art; and, by the greater strength of a human
affection, the divine statue seemed to fall asunder again, and become only a heap of worthless fragments.

While the sculptor sat listlessly gazing at it, there was a sound of small hoofs, clumsily galloping on the
Campagna; and soon his frisky acquaintance, the buffalo-calf, came and peeped over the edge of the excavation. Almost
at the same moment he heard voices, which approached nearer and nearer; a man’s voice, and a feminine one, talking the
musical tongue of Italy. Besides the hairy visage of his four footed friend, Kenyon now saw the figures of a peasant
and a contadina, making gestures of salutation to him, on the opposite verge of the hollow space.